


When the Demon Does Not Leave the Door

by NorthwesternInsanity



Category: Music RPF, Steely Dan (Band)
Genre: Angst, Anxiety, Gen, Loneliness, Loyalty, Lyric References
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-28
Updated: 2019-03-28
Packaged: 2019-12-25 20:15:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18268601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NorthwesternInsanity/pseuds/NorthwesternInsanity
Summary: "To keep him going. Or so I thought."Donald Fagen pushes through a week on his own during a mid-80s winter after the release ofThe Nightflyand during his spell of writer's block and nervous breakdowns. Motivation exists only in a mission for someone from an old world who is pushing through his own, out of sight and thousands of miles away.





	When the Demon Does Not Leave the Door

The break in the set for the hour came, and the piano silenced at the front of the room, leaving the buzz of conversation between occupants to fill the space of the jazz club tucked away on one of the narrower streets of New York City that Donald Fagen had settled into for the time being.

The current performer remained at the front, awaiting the next part of the set, and Donald saw his chance. He plucked a folded, white paper cocktail napkin from the stack on the counter in the corner, and sneaked his way to the front.

He didn't need to explain the main part of his intentions; he was visibly awaited by the time he arrived to the front. But it was the extra request he had that made it worthwhile.

"Hey, if you'll do me the favor, sign it to Walter," he mumbled quietly, as though a mere whisper was audible through the room over the din and chatter.

"He's not here himself, is he? What for?" As usual, Donald found himself under an inquisitive stare, but the gentleman before him didn't look so threatening as some he had faced. What looked him in the eyes this time was merely curiosity. There was still a good chance, despite the question formed between them, that he would be a cool one. A good, major dude. The type Donald sought after the most.

"No, it's not for me. Look, it's a long story. There's no reason t'give the details, just sign it 'to Walter', alright? That's what's important. If that's not gonna happen, y'might as well forget it."

Bless this particular guy, who nodded as he fixed Donald with a knowing look that could have impaled him -had he left himself unguarded for the wide array of responses he'd come to expect -and signed the paper fabric with a flourish of a pen, creating a near-illegible signature. It looked the same and different in a number of ways from the others which Donald had collected through the evening, but no matter how redundant they seemed, now more than any other time, they each held immense meaning going far beyond the name hidden in the scrawls.

Beneath the signature of this one read: _"-to Walter. Hope you're well. Keep your rhythm strong."_

One of the truest major dudes he'd found lately. Enough to prompt Donald to stay for the next change of set, rather than leaving in search of a new club to visit.

The pattern repeated with the change of set, and with later changes in location through the evening. Some of those he encountered were cool and sent him off with the signature, and the best, with a short message added. Some were less cool then the show they put on that prompted Donald's approach, but were reasonable enough to give him a signature to Walter's name, if with the added tax of a baleful glare before shoving it back at him.

Some scoffed, believing 'Walter' was some staff member on the premise who ought to come get their own signature if they were so desperate for it. They sent Donald on his way - _'get your beak out of my face and get out of here!'_ -empty-handed to retreat to a seat he'd scouted in the corner, wistful and resigned until the next change of set, or until the playing had resumed so that he could slink out undetected to another place down the street. 

_He doesn't need your regards; be glad you at least sound good enough to have mine._

The cycle continued until closing time approached with the wee hours of the morning at his last stop of the night. He was finally pushed through the doors and shoved between the evacuating drunkards into the harsh, biting, New York winter winds. Only once the folded stack of napkins he'd accumulated were safely tucked within a bag tied to the inside of his coat did he slip through a gap in the mayhem for refuge. There in the gap, he drew his scarf tight around his neck to seal the cold out before making his last walk of the night toward home.

Arriving home, Donald laid out the napkins from five successful missions out of six attempts for the night. From the back of the counter he laid them on, he pulled four other groups forward from other nights throughout the week. 

Monday gave only one success. A less-busy night, marked with the downed mood of an entire week stretching ahead, with great length between it and the promise of another weekend's heightened business and festivities. Not many clubs were even hosting performers on such a night, and being able to walk away with one signature was good considering.

Tuesday night had been harder, despite there being more life on the streets. After a day of inescapable boredom, it granted him two signatures from six tries across four different locations. At each jazz club he made his way into, Donald was vehemently shoved away by all but the best major dudes when he arrived with the appearance of being already well-past hammered. He was, in fact sober, but under the grips of a near-incapacitating head cold. The stinging, dry wind he took his night walks in had finally gotten the better of him, leaving him congested, red-eyed, and fuzzy-minded enough to dull the darker thoughts he might have had on other nights for those who pushed him away. The only silver lining to be had was it had muted his anxiety that would have otherwise crept up on him for such a night. His mind was too clouded and tired to run itself into a frenzy, bothered by the unusually cold reception he faced.

Despite finding little escape from the rest of the world for himself through the music -something difficult to achieve when his ears plugged up each time he forced a sniff -he tried anyway. He tried and appreciated what he could from where he sat in the corner, grounded in miserable reality set to the somber soundtracks playing out around him and holding his head when the low notes of the piano vibrated painfully through his stuffed sinuses, until some jerk of a bouncer grabbed him by the coat collar and shoved him back out in the freezing air for another walk to 'bring him back to his senses'. At the fourth eviction, he hung it up and walked home.

He had nothing to show for any part of Wednesday whatsoever. The previous night's trudge through the frigid streets, combined with the disappointing lack of success and escape left him too stricken with illness to stand facing another night like it. He'd attempted a grapple with his incessant writer's block in the earlier part of the day with the little energy he had instead. Not bothering to make vocal attempts that would have been useless for any purpose when he was too tired to get a laugh out of how pathetic he might have sounded from being so sick, he tried to put hands to the piano and run along some old tunes he had fondness for, in case something flipped a switch. Nothing caught within him. However, he instead caught himself zoned out over the keyboard with a start, staring into the distance, half-asleep with sheer, feverish boredom, and with no sense of when he'd lost himself and how long he'd been there. Mere seconds after coming back to his senses, before he could reorient himself, the phone rang at a jarring pitch that evoked images of a furious, shadowed figure on the other end, launching daggers toward his ears and fit to blow a fuse at his immediate decision not to pick it up.

That _did_ end up flipping a switch in Donald -to bring his anxiety screaming back through the clouds into his mind with a vengeance. The phone provided a normally-silent entity with a shrill voice as it rang twenty times before whoever on the other end gave up -too loud to escape from any position in the apartment. The sound chased him into a suffocating panic attack, locked in the bathroom and huddled on the floor between the shower and the laundry basket. An hour passed there before there was no remaining apparent chance something would attack him if he came up from the floor to reach for the medicine cabinet. At that, he ingested three antidepressants at once on top of his cold medicine, leaving only a minute to spare on the crawl through the apartment to disarm the phone by placing it off its hook, and to strike off the day on the calendar, marking all efforts to make it through a crushing failure. Then he'd retreated to his bed and the hole he'd dug in the towering pile of blankets it took to create a sufficient hideaway from the world.

The world went black as soon as he'd laid down in it and the heavy dosage pitched him over the edge, and stayed that way flying into and through the night.

Thursday, he came back up ready for a fight, determined not to lose again. He'd pushed himself back to the piano with the heart he hadn't had the previous day to attempt singing with the old tunes he played, and to smirk when each pitiful attempt cracked with mucus in his throat at halfway up his vocal range.

Though he'd had numerous reasons to question his judgement on taking to the streets and reentering the same jazz clubs he'd been thrown from on Tuesday, he had four successes to show for it at the end of the night, and they were just as much the best medicine for his downed mood as for the stubborn remains of his cold -at least while he was there.

The Friday upswing of mood granted him seven signatures from four different clubs. The winning night of the week, if no surprise to him.

Saturday could have granted him more success than the five he'd come home with, just as Friday could have probably done better, for what it had done. If certain establishments were not so busy and claustrophobic on those nights -too much so for what Donald had the nerves to withstand in the state of mind he'd been in.

The Saturday successes joined the lineup to the right of the Friday ones, laying out overnight for the wrinkled folds to relax and for the ink to fully dry, lest it run loose and bleed when introduced to the warm, humid, Hawaiian air they would hit on the far end of the journey they were soon to make.

Sunday morning, Donald returned to the splay on the counter, and the calendar they lay overtop of, assessing the notes for the week. Which days he was in session with soundtrack composers, and which days he had to undergo the necessary, evil torture that was therapy -because anything that had a bat's chance in hell of putting his anxiety back in its place and breaking the cycle of writer's block was worth trying by now. From there, he synthesized his battle plan for each night ahead in the time he suspected he would have, as well as what he would feel up to for the days there was any predictable factor to it. How many places he could make it to. Where to go based on how far away they were from home and each other, and the time it would take to get there for the quality of musicians who often showed up to each place. With a week ahead and most of the musicians taking Sunday night off, he would suspend his club visits for the night. Monday, the cycle would start from the beginning, and it would endlessly repeat in the weeks to follow, plus or minus the few small unpredictable details that only life itself could plan.

He stacked the signatures in order, progressing through the week, ending the stack with his Saturday night gains, and tucked them into an envelope.

Sunday, as usual, was marked with a more silent, contemplative walk down a less lively street, away from the establishments of entertainment, and toward the post office. It was the same street he'd walked down each day a mere two years prior, to the studio that he'd crashed out his life confessions from a more innocent time and seemingly bled out all the inspiration within him, which still lay lifeless -enough to know that at least some part of it was never coming back if any of it ever did. Even in the upbeat process of the recordings, the death had showed itself coming in the end, with a studio that was far too quiet and lifeless of wit to light the spark of any source of inspiration.

Every few weeks -on the days he had a chance of getting through -Donald dared to step back into the building and look around, in case the sight of anything brought something back. 

Aside from the memories of recording words of homesickness in California, wishing to be sent home to New York, the only thing to find was the sense that home was no longer waiting there on arrival.

On the nights he sneaked in and left in the shadows, dodging being put on display by the street lamps, it seemed that anybody walking by to witness his exit from the building whom he caught direct sight of looked on with the threat of murder in their eyes, demanding answers for what kind of freak like him would be there at the hour. Hiding paranoia behind the facade of the glare his eyebrows naturally rested in, he dismissed the stares with the curling of his lip to a sneer just over the edge of his scarf. A stern message, left unpunctuated by the absence of the nasal snort that would have surely followed, if not for the void at his side. 

Donald could have produced the sound himself, but it wouldn't give him the same, snarky satisfaction as hearing it come from a source external to himself with the same sentiment to back his own. He hadn't needed to try it to know and accept the fact. So he kept his responses silent and ducked his gaze to the ground before his own two feet once they were sent, hearing instead the wind rushing past him through the empty space to remind him that he was exposed and vulnerable to the cold, cruel world. From _all_ angles.

As he arrived to the rusted, metal overhang beside the post office and the outgoing drop boxes, tonight, the cold came in the sharper form of frozen precipitate driven by the wind at an angle inescapable even with the aid of an umbrella. The innocence that had bled out of life with the last written catharsis remained silent rather than chiming in with the notion of walking between them -something only a fool would say with serious meaning. Outside of the context of lighthearted, song-written fantasy, the concept seemed so silly -to be able to stride through the gaps between each drop -that Donald found himself laughing bitterly with the striking of frozen rain against himself and wondering if it was because the week ahead was shaping up with the slightest chance to be better, or if he was just going insane at the end of the one he'd had. 

Whichever didn't matter when either way, he could keep himself going until the morning the demon finally left his apartment door and stayed gone -as he had across countless days it had seemed otherwise. As strange as it might always be, life went on.

Something he could only hope was true for the recipient of his efforts on the opposite end of nearly 5000 miles.

_This is just to show how many major dudes back here haven't forgotten you. And that at least one of them will still remember if it all falls together again someday. -Don,_ read Donald's own note on paper he slipped into the envelope between the napkin folds, before sealing it shut to never lay eyes on again, as with his countless other endeavors.

_To keep him going,_ he said silently as he slipped the envelope into the mail to leave first thing in the morning. _To keep US going._

If, he supposed, it didn't make him a fool to say there was a chance it could.


End file.
